Introduction, Specifications and Packaging

Introduction:

It seems a lot of folks have been incorporating Silicon Motion's SM2246EN controller into their product lines. We first reviewed the Angelbird SSD wrk, but only in a 512GB capacity. We then reviewed a pair of Corsair Force LX's (256GB and 512GB). ADATA has joined the club with their new Premier SP610 product line, and today we are going to take a look at all available capacities of this new model:

It's fortunate that ADATA was able to sample us a full capacity spread, as this will let us evaluate all shipping SSD capacites that exist for the Silicon Motion SM2246EN controller.

Introduction, Specifications and Packaging

Introduction:

A few months back, we took a look at the ADATA Premier Pro SP920 series of SSDs. Those came equipped with the Marvell 88SS9189 controller. Marvell SSD controllers have always done a good job, and they were among the first to support SATA 6Gbit speeds. Crucial was one of the first to adopt the Marvell controller into their SATA SSD products, so it seems fitting that we revisit the 88SS9189 controller in the form of Micron's Crucial M550 Series of SSDs:

Being one of the big manufacturers of SSDs, Micron has some cool production videos. Here's one of their videos covering the production of flash all the way through to the assembly of an SSD. We actually toured one of these plants a few years back. Good stuff:

First, and clearly the most exciting: the 1TB version of the Samsung 840 EVO SSD is now selling for just $399. That comes in at $0.399/GB, which is actually better than the cost per GB of the Crucial MX100 that launched this month. If you haven't picked up an SSD that is big enough to hold all your games, this is the perfect opportunity!

The new Samsung 840 EVO mSATA SSD has arrived with 1TB of storage at a price comparable to the existing 2.5" form. This different way to connect an SSD will not be with us long as M.2 starts to be adopted but currently offers the same benefits as the full sized connection you are more familiar with. From the tests conducted at SSD Review you can see that this would be a great update to a laptop which possesses an mSATA slot and will greatly improve performance. While endurance is possibly a concern the fact that Samsung offers a 3 year warranty should assuage your worries somewhat.

"There is no doubt in anyones mind that 2014 will be the year of the M.2/NGFF SSD, however, Samsung is about to release an SSD that is guaranteed to rock the SSD community like few others have. This SSD is the Samsung 840 EVO 1TB mSATA SSD and it, not only is the one and only mSATA SSD capable of 1TB storage available in the world, but also, Samsung has priced this SSD at only $10 higher than it’s sister 1TB notebook form factor SSD. To say that there are more than a few mSATA SSD storage based notebook owners that have been waiting for some time for exactly this type of capacity is an understatement; Lenovo Thinkpad sales surpassed the 60 million mark some time ago."

According to a recent press release, OCZ Technology Co. is going to up the Octane ante with a 1TB solid state drive. Coming in at an MSRP of $3,238 USD (approx. 260,000 yen), the SSD features 1TB of synchronous MLC flash, 512MB of DRAM, and an Indilinx Everest controller bundled in a 2.5” form factor.

The SATA 3 (6Gbps) OCT1-25SAT3-1T SSD not only brings gobs of storage, but puts up some respectable performance numbers. It is capable of 460MB/s sequential reads and 330MB/s sequential write speeds. Also, it can deliver a maximum of 24,000 4K read IOPS (input/output operations per second) and 32,000 4K random write IOPS [the translation may be off here, I was expecting to see the higher IOPS reflected as 4K reads and not writes]. Other drive features include TRIP support, ECC (error correction), AES-256 drive encryption, SMART diagnostics, and a MTBF (mean time between failures) of 1,200,000 hours.

The 1TB SSD is slated for a mid-May release and will come with a 3 year warranty. You know, my birthday is coming up in a couple months... (hehe)

Introduction

It's been a long while since we've looked at a hard drive, and how fitting that it be a new model of the Western Digital VelociRaptor! Western Digital appears to be on a somewhat fixed 2-year cycle with these, as out 600GB VelociRaptor Review went up two Aprils ago, and the 300GB two years prior to that. Well then, let's take a look at this new model!

(from left) 300GB, 600GB, and finally the 1TB VelociRaptor

Here's the old school VelociRaptor logo (from back when they were less than 100GB!)

I was over at HardOCP today and saw something awesome: a pocket knife with 1 TB of storage! Victorinox is going to launch two new styles of pocket knife flash drives, and will be showing them off next week at CES. Both drives have up to 1TB of flash storage, a pocket knife like case, a USB / eSATA connection, and a monochromatic LCD screen to display information about the drive.

Everyone knows your storage runs faster with the knife equipped!

The drives come in two colors, black or red. The red flash drive also doubles as a pocket knife by including a knife and a pair of scissors. The black drive is TSA friendly and is only the flash drive itself in the case. All I know is that it may be time for me to upgrade from my aging 4GB PNY flash drive as this looks cool. On the other hand, they are only USB 2.0, and just thinking about how long it would take to transfer 1TB of data to this thing makes my head hurt.

Samsung today announced a new update to their Spinpoint laptop hard drive line, the Spinpoint M8 1 TB. Joining the storage ranks of the Seagate Constellation and Western Digital Scorpio 1 TB drives, the new Samsung hard disk features two 500 GB platters in a 2.5” 9.5mm form factor along with an 8 MB buffer, and utilizes a SATA II (3Gb/s) interface. The 500 GB per platter density was achieved by using their Advanced Format Technology (AFT), which raises the data storage density per unit area, which results in a reduced number of requisite platters and read/write heads. Samsung claims that the reduction in necessary components results in a seven percent performance increase as well as an eight percent decrease in the amount of power drawn.

The new 2.5” drive carries an MSRP of $129.00 USD. Mobile gamers and road warriors in particular are likely happy to see competition in the 1 TB+ laptop arena, which should hep to bring the 1 TB mobile drives’ prices a bit closer to their 1 TB desktop brethren. You can read more about the new drive here.